The Sweet Escape: Effects of Mortality Salience on Consumption Quantities for High- and Low-Self-Esteem Consumers

Abstract

This research demonstrates that exposure to death-related stimuli can increase consumers' amounts of purchasing and consumption. We demonstrate that consumers who have been recently reminded of their own impending mortality wish to purchase higher quantities of food products (and actually eat higher quantities) than do their control counterparts. This effect occurs primarily among low-self-esteem consumers. We explain our findings in terms of escape from self-awareness. Low (but not high) self-esteem participants overconsume in response to a mortality salience activation as a means to escape from self-awareness. We also address alternative explanations for these effects. (c) 2008 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc..

The Effects of Thin and Heavy Media Images on Overweight and Underweight Consumers: Social Comparison Processes and Behavioral Implications

“…After that, we measured participants' cookie intake and diet and exercise intentions. Participants then entered a room in which three plates were piled with three different flavors of small cookies (Mandel and Smeesters 2008). Each plate contained 20 cookies.…”

The Safety of Objects: Materialism, Existential Insecurity, and Brand Connection

“…Consequently, when mortality salience is increased, individuals express stronger belief in their cultural worldviews. Over the past 2 decades, this mortality salience hypothesis has received substantial validation from hundreds of empirical studies across a diverse range of subjects and settings (see Arndt et al [2004] and Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski [2004] for reviews of this literature) and has recently gained the attention of consumer researchers (Ferraro et al 2005;Mandel and Heine 1999;Mandel and Smeesters 2008). Despite its well-established roots in psychology and growing interest within consumer research, the associations between existential insecurity and both materialism and brand connection have just begun to be sketched.…”

“…However, we take a more expansive view by recognizing that brand connections may also have communal aspects (Muniz and O'Guinn 2001). Our conceptualization of the relationship between materialism and brand connection is largely based on terror management theory (TMT; Greenberg et al 1990;Rosenblatt et al 1989;Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski 1991), which is an important but underused framework for understanding consumer behavior (Arndt et al 2004;Ferraro, Shiv, and Bettman 2005;Maheswaran and Agrawal 2004;Mandel and Smeesters 2008). Our key proposition is that materialistic individuals form strong connections to their brands as a means of buffering existential insecurity, which we define as anxiety associated with the awareness of one's mortality (Becker 1973).…”

Titanic: Consuming the Myths and Meanings of an Ambiguous Brand

“…According to Turley (2005), paraphrasing Bauman (1992), death is the wellspring of all cultural activity and contemporary consumer behavior (Baudrillard 1993). In a secular society, consumers banish morbid thoughts of their inevitable demise-what Bonsu and Belk (2003) term "terror management"-with compensatory consumption (Mandel and Smeesters 2008;Rindfleisch, Burroughs, and Wong 2009). However, consumers of Titanic cannot avoid wondering what they would do in the same terrible circumstances.…”